The advogato mission statement states that this
site was created "to serve as a nice, friendly gathering
place for all the wonderful people in our community." Is
the goal to have a small group of exhalted leaders with
soapbox privileges and a large group of lurkers whose
role is to bask in the glow of the former group's genius
(and celebrity)?

I have sympathy for folks who try to create sites like
this: the task of achieving the proper balance between
openness and a tolerable signal-to-noise ratio is a
daunting one. But the method used here to keep order
seems more like something a drug dealer would use
to ensure that he's not selling to a narc.

And besides, who is to say that one has to be a
seasoned "open source" developer to contribute in a
meaningful way? Such a belief is akin to the view that
critics have no role in art because they're not artists.
There is little correlation (and perhaps less causation)
between talent and the ability to critically evaluate such
talent.

Of course, this is the obvious argument of the
outsider -- why would someone with credentials bother
making such an argument? Unless, of course, such a
person had the intellectual honesty and sympathy to
address the issue. That my position is self-serving
should not disqualify it.

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser
code is live. It needs further work but already handles most
markup better than the original parser.